Hi, I’m Heather; I am from Lehi, Utah. The last time we came to the booksigning two years ago, I was also very pregnant, and I gave birth 24 hours later. [laughter] So cross your fingers!
But my question is…I have not been a Wheel of Time fan as long as my husband—he introduced me to them after we were married—and I know that the female characters get a lot of hate from the fans sometimes, cause…well, I’ve always loved them; I thought they were really well-developed, and I really love the woman’s world that’s been developed in the series, too; you at least see Elayne’s midwife appointments, and we see a lot of other things, and the women’s magic is almost exclusively through the books until Rand comes along and kinds of makes things for the guys better again.
So, how…I don’t know how to phrase this, but how did Robert Jordan write about women so well, because a lot of times I feel like he hits the nail right on the head. Did you really influence that, Harriet, or…was he just a sensitive guy? [laughter]
I did not consciously influence it. At a very early signing in California, a group of women came in, in long skirts, and they had on kind of shawls, and long hair, and they went up to him at the signing table—there were three or four of them—and they said, “Well, this settles an argument.” And he was looking up at them, and he said, “About what?” And they said, “We felt that Robert Jordan must be the nom de plume of a woman writer, because who could write women that well?” And he said, “Well, I’m not.” [laughter] Looking up through his beard. [laughter]
But he, with the first book I think it was, Tor sent down a fan letter, and very sillily, had taken it out of the envelope, and it was a hand-written letter from a woman in Florida, who said, “You have answered the question that Freud was afraid of: ‘What do women want?’ They want power, just like men.” [laughter, applause] And I think maybe that’s what made his women so good.
Thank you.
Good luck, and I hope you get home safely this time! [laughter]
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